Stony Brook Reservation.

[urbpan]

Here are some pictures of our Sunday.




I took this as I waited for Alexis to pick us up a couple sandwiches from Dunkin' Donuts, on Rt. 9 in Brookline.



Earlier in the year, this bittersweet nightshade climbed the fence. Now its persistent winter fruit is held aloft, in the hopes that birds will eat them and spread the seeds.



Then we went to the Stony Brook Reservation, a swath of protected land that spreads over the Boston boroughs of Roslindale and Hyde Park, at the border of the town of Dedham. It's a forested wetland, with a few stony hills rising from it. We'll do our next Urban Nature Walk there, so I need to do more research about it.



Some parts of the reservation's margin appear to have been used as a landfill. I found large rusting metal appliances along the fenceline, which divided the reservation from a City of Boston owned golf course.



We hiked for a while and eventually climbed a hill, which the trail map seems to identify as "the perch," and got a view of Turtle Pond down below.



Alexis took lots of pictures (better than mine). You can see them here.



Charlie got to go swimming in Turtle Pond, as it was still very warm for January (about 50 degrees).

Comments

[by-steph.livejournal.com]

Yay, red currants!

[treeclimber47.livejournal.com]

There are a pair of American Chestnut in Stonybrook that produce viable chestnuts, the trees don't appear to have any blight. Someone goes in there with a cherry-picker and harvests the fruit of the blight resistant trees. At the location you can see where they cut down trees around the chestnuts and the ruts from the cherry picker. Ironically some blight resistant chestnuts in Gerogia were accidentally killed (sun scald) when surrounding trees were cut down by researchers to "improve" the health and nut yield of the tree.